BLOOD MOON OVER BETONVILLE

Doucette’s thriller follows an FBI agent haunted by a terrifying childhood trauma that threatens to destroy him—and countless innocents.

When FBI profiler Tom Milner was a child, he and his family moved from New York City to Betonville, Pennsylvania, a small town in the rural northwestern part of the state. One night, on a dare, the 5-year-old Milner and his best friend, Ben Potter, rode their bikes into the woods bordering the Allegheny National Forest—about a half-million acres of largely unexplored wilderness—where they were tasked by schoolmates with finding an old haunted cemetery under a bloodred moon. The spooky dare soon turned into a living nightmare; Milner thought he saw a giant, fur-covered creature crash through the darkness on the cliffs above him. The sound coming from the red-eyed thing was horrifying, and Milner and his friend barely escaped with their lives: “It was guttural and loud, like the enraged screams of a man mixed with the roar of a lion or a bear.” Decades later, working as one of the FBI’s most successful profilers (and struggling to stay afloat as a barely functioning alcoholic), Milner is called back to Betonville when a massive “boneyard” is discovered near the national forest. The site contains dozens of decomposed bodies whose deaths span over a century, and Milner knows instinctively that the carnage is somehow tied to the creature, who may or may not be a figment of his younger self’s imagination. With his old friend Ben (who’s now the Betonville sheriff) assisting him, Milner discovers a horrific truth: He is intimately connected to “Satan’s beast.” Doucette’s chilling novel is a darkly delectable offering sure to appeal to fans of police procedurals and supernatural thrillers. The blend of gritty crime fiction, local folklore, and paranormal fantasy is perfect, creating a storyline in which anything can happen. References to serial killers, satanic cults, bloody rituals, and even the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000 add complementary layers of bladder-loosening horror and tonally spot-on humor to the story.

The X-Files meets William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist in the backwoods of Appalachia.